Book Image

Hands-On C++ Game Animation Programming

By : Gabor Szauer
Book Image

Hands-On C++ Game Animation Programming

By: Gabor Szauer

Overview of this book

Animation is one of the most important parts of any game. Modern animation systems work directly with track-driven animation and provide support for advanced techniques such as inverse kinematics (IK), blend trees, and dual quaternion skinning. This book will walk you through everything you need to get an optimized, production-ready animation system up and running, and contains all the code required to build the animation system. You’ll start by learning the basic principles, and then delve into the core topics of animation programming by building a curve-based skinned animation system. You’ll implement different skinning techniques and explore advanced animation topics such as IK, animation blending, dual quaternion skinning, and crowd rendering. The animation system you will build following this book can be easily integrated into your next game development project. The book is intended to be read from start to finish, although each chapter is self-contained and can be read independently as well. By the end of this book, you’ll have implemented a modern animation system and got to grips with optimization concepts and advanced animation techniques.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Chapter 3: Implementing Matrices

In the context of game animation, a matrix represents an affine transformation. It linearly maps points from one space to another. A mesh is represented by vertices, which are just points in space. These vertices are moved by multiplying them by a matrix.

In this chapter, you will learn matrix math and how to implement matrices in code. By the end of this chapter, you will have built a robust matrix library that can be used in any project. Matrices are important; they play a big role in the graphics pipeline. It's hard to render anything without using matrices.

You will only need to implement a square, 4 x 4 matrix. By the end of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

  • Understand what a matrix is
  • Understand column-major matrix storage
  • Multiply matrices together
  • Invert a matrix
  • Transform points and vectors by using a matrix
  • Understand how to create matrices to view a three-dimensional world

    Important...